Windows Vista “mini dump” Blue Screen

May be a “spoof” blue screen, but pay attention to any error codes that may appear, write them down

Read reports about failure related to error codes, since just typing “mini-dump” into Google won’t come up with much, as it’s such a generic term.

Most likely a hardware problem, though software could be the issue as well.

props to: techguylabs.com for some of this information

Recording What’s Coming Out Of Sound Card

• The soundcard must support “full duplex”
• Older soundcards cannot support that
• Should be able to record sound from your sound card using a program such as Audacity.

Mac or Vista

 It depends on your budget of course, but the question is no longer should I choose OS X or Vista, it’s who should I buy my hardware from. Dell’s great but you can only run Windows or Linux on it. If you buy an Apple laptop or desktop machine, you can run those (using Apple’s Bootcamp or Parallels) and OS X.

source: techguylabs.com

Quitting Programs On A Timer

I’d look at the new Windows Powershell – or, you could write a handy backup script that could do everything on schedule.

source: techguylabs.com

Reading Old Jaz Disks

He’s got an Iomega Jaz drive and wants to recover the data off the disks, but it’s got a SCSI connector. Adaptec makes a USB to SCSI adapter, but it’s Windows only.

source: techguylabs.com 

Internet Radio Keeps Buffering

Works fine in one room, but the Macbook Pro he set up in the kitchen is constantly buffering. He’s using a 50-foot ethernet cable. That could be one problem (although CAT-5 should go much longer than that). Maybe it’s the way Apple is handling the streaming Windows data?

If you can run a wireless network instead of hard-wired, and use either 802.11g or 802.11n, your internet speed should increase. If you use ethernet cable, the signal strength will degrade over long distances.

A possibility may also be viruses or spyware on the network, but the speed of the network is more likely the issue.

You might want to look at an Internet radio – C Crane sells a great one.

source: techguylabs.com

Why Is My Hard Drive Showing Up Smaller Then Advertised?

A 320GB hard drive will only appear as a 300GB. That’s due to the decimal vs binary difference. Computers work in binary but hard drive manufacturers prefer to measure their hard drives in decimal because they sound bigger. So, for example a gigabyte in binary is 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. In decimal it’s only 1,000,000,000. 320GB in decimal is really only 298GB in binary. HP also reserves several gigs as a hidden partition, which many manufacturers do now, as they claim it’s pricey to ship Restore Discs with each new computer, though the user can create them as well.

PC Guide explains this more thoroughly.

source: techguylabs.com

MythTV

MythTV is an the excellent free Linux-based DVR (digital video recorder) software. The easiest way to install it is with the Knoppmyth distro.

source: techguylabs.com

Keyboard keys are permanently pressed

Sounds like it’s a keyboard short, or that the keyboard is really dirty, so should clean it. To make sure it’s not the OS, try booting one of the live CD versions of Linux. If the keyboard works well otherwise, you just need a new keyboard!

Convert .docx to .doc

Here is a couple of links to a free websites that will convert Microsoft Word “.docx” format to the more traditional “.doc”.

http://docx-converter.com

http://zamzar.com/